In an era when social media has turned us all into products to promote, Keke Palmer is the whole damn corporation. As a one-woman multimedia, multiplatform conglomerate, the 31-year-old is starring in acclaimed movies (the Oscar-robbed stripper heist film Hustlers; Jordan Peele’s 2022 sci-fi-western-horror hybrid Nope), releasing R&B pop music (including 2020’s Virgo Tendencies, Pt II), hosting gameshows (the Jimmy Fallon-produced Password on NBC), talkshows (Just Keke on BET, plus a stint on Good Morning America) and her own podcast (Baby, This Is Keke Palmer), all the while regularly serving up sassy memes to the hungry internet hordes as casually as McDonald’s serves fries. It’s like Keke Palmer writes in the introduction to Keke Palmer’s new book Master of Me: The Secret to Controlling Your Narrative – in the diva-ish third-person, of course – Keke Palmer can do it all, honey!
This morning, that means being in New York to record some additional dialogue on her new movie and finish the edit on a new TV show she’s producing, then squeezing in some time watching Sesame Street with her 20-month-old son, Leodis, before ducking out to find a quiet spot to continue our video chat about Master of Me – which, she says, isn’t a memoir exactly. “I think my push-up against the word is because it feels so me, me, me,” she says.
